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Wednesday, 21 November 2012

Llama bean

This release fixes a couple of problems with airplane mode and Wifi in Jelly Bean 4.2.

First off... the Wifi one. Llama stopped being able to tell what Wifi network was connected, which also had the knock-on effect of not knowing when a specific network was disconnected. This is because the API now returns the network name in double-quotes. My phone (which is still running 4.1.2) doesn't have the network name in double-quotes. Llama's simple string comparison was failing. Another crash was caused by a wifi network being able to have an empty-string named Wifi network. Easy to fix, lets move on!

Airplane mode now requires root. Yep, you read that correctly... an API that has been really simple to use and implement since Android 1.5 (or at least 2.1 when I first started coding for Android) now requires you to use root access to change it. Who knows why? Maybe it was deemed a security risk. I can live with that. What I don't understand is why there is now no way for normal apps to change it. People like Android because they can customise and use apps to automate airplane mode. Llama didn't originally change airplane mode, but you guys asked for it. People want to change airplane mode Google!

There should be a standard Android permission that lets apps change airplane mode, however everyone knows no one bothers to read the permissions on the market, so that won't help. What should really have happened is that airplane mode should require Device Administrator access, like the lock screen or turning off the screen. That way people will be forced to confirm what apps can change airplane mode when they first use that action, rather than having to root their phones.